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Signature Sizes: Is it time to make an announcement?

Signature Sizes: Is it time to make an announcement?
ashkai said:
If it helps your signature is very beautiful... and i can actually see the whole thing without having to zoom out. Sometimes signatures get so wide that part of them is off screen.

I love the big eyed Alice on the purple starred background. It looks really dynamic.
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OH , you are so sweet! Thank you!:)
 
Psycho Pixie said:
I am actually not sure if gif's and siggy size are what is causing all the crashes. Database and server error 500 means what exactly? We really need a Computer geek to weigh in here.

Also, for me, when the forum crashes it is at peak times, not specific threads, but specific times like noon and 6pm PST. When everyone is on-line. It also tends to be more "crash like" when there is a thread up that everyone is reading constantly, like a big grail auction, a drama-rama thread or a big release info thread.

With that i give you, a pic, not a gif... of some icecream. Because it appears some noses got bent and we need some ice cream love.
ice-cream-cone-dishes-spo.jpg




My siggy is nice the size it is at, Doodlebug, the wonderful person who made it, offered me 3 diff sizes when it was first made and I chose this one.
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oh! i want those cup and spoons for icecream!!! And the icecream to!!!
 
Psycho Pixie said:
I am actually not sure if gif's and siggy size are what is causing all the crashes. Database and server error 500 means what exactly? We really need a Computer geek to weigh in here.
Click to expand...

I can try to help explain the basics :) (although I don't often work with servers and large databases, so if someone is a bigger computer geek than I, please correct me if I'm wrong!).

A fairly official explanation of an error 500 is can be found here: http://www.checkupdown.com/status/E500.html

This basically says, a number of things could have gone wrong, but it's all on the server side meaning that it has nothing to do with your computer or your internet connection. Super helpful, right? From what I've read from Goofy Moe's fundraising posts and other posts around the forum, it sounds like there are a couple of issues that are probably causing the server to crash.

1. Too many members for the number of servers DPF has For every member that is logged in and making a request (ie viewing a new thread, submitting a post, changing profile details), the server has to deal with it. A server can only process one request at a time. All requests except for the one that is currently being processed are put into a queue to wait. Most requests do not take too long to process, so it is usually not very noticeable that you've been waiting. But the server can only have so many requests in the queue at once. Once that queue reaches it's capacity, the server cannot process any incoming requests until it has more room in the queue. It will continue to crash for people until it has processed some requests. The big problem comes when it processes one request and then gets 10 more and then processes 1 request and gets 10 more etc, so it seems like the site is just completely down because only one of those requests can actually get through.

The best solution to this problem is to get more servers to handle the number of requests coming in. A good temporary solution is, as other people have mentioned, fewer gifs and smaller signatures (both in pixel size and byte size) as this will make pages faster to load and will allow the server to get to a new request that much faster.

2. The database is reaching its limits A database holds many things. In the case of DPF it holds everyone's profile information, all the posts within a thread, all the threads within the forum and all the information associated with each of these things. As you can imagine, that's a lot of information! Text is cheap. A single character only takes up 1-2 bytes depending on how it is encoded. But images are costly, and videos even more so (1kb is equal to 1024 bytes). This is why when you upload an image or a video to a post, it asks for a URL. The images and videos are actually being stored in another website's database so that the only thing taking up room in DPF's database is the text for the URL. (At least, I believe that is how images are being handled...) Even though text takes up a small amount of space, the database is still limited. It can only hold a finite amount and once we get closer and closer to reaching that amount, two things happen. First, there is more information to sort through so it is harder for the server to find what it is looking for. This causes a request to take longer to process and eventually the queue will get too long and the server will crash. Second, if new information is put into a database that doesn't have a lot of storage space it gets harder and harder to find places to put that data. This isn't as immediate of a problem, but it is still a problem.

The best solution to this is to get a bigger and better database, or maybe even multiple databases to hold different pieces of information (this is typically what big websites like Amazon do to make things more efficient). But until we can do that, image size (this time just the byte size) is what will help. It seems that all sigpics are stored in the database, which is why both images from URLs and images from your computer are limited to 125kb. The forum software automatically changes the image for you so that it is under 125kb (if your signature looks pixelated, the computer simplified your image to make the byte size smaller). But if you can get it under 125 kb, every little bit helps!

Every website is run differently on the back end, so this might not be 100% accurate as to how DPF works. But hopefully all of that makes sense and will answer some questions on people's minds.
 
amypins said:
A good temporary solution is, as other people have mentioned, fewer gifs and smaller signatures (both in pixel size and byte size) as this will make pages faster to load and will allow the server to get to a new request that much faster.
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But until we can do that, image size (this time just the byte size) is what will help. It seems that all sigpics are stored in the database, which is why both images from URLs and images from your computer are limited to 125kb. The forum software automatically changes the image for you so that it is under 125kb (if your signature looks pixelated, the computer simplified your image to make the byte size smaller). But if you can get it under 125 kb, every little bit helps!
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:bowdown: :rock: :bigthumb: :bowdown:
 
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Do you also think it would help if we deleted really old threads that may not be beneficial to us anymore? I know they stated in the past that they wouldn't delete threads.
 
tyleet87 said:
Do you also think it would help if we deleted really old threads that may not be beneficial to us anymore? I know they stated in the past that they wouldn't delete threads.
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That is a good suggestion, but how would one decide which thread is necessary and which one is not? Look at me, I pulled up a thread from more than one year ago.

Maybe most of the zap/thank you kind of thing older than one year can be erased. But who has time for that? Is it something time consuming or something as simple as 1-2 clicks?

Where is our comp geek ?? Amy needs to weigh in.
 
i tried to make my signature smaller, but you cant read my name,,,,,oh wait, ....

Thanks Selen i agree we need to hear from the bosses of DPF, we have been asked before to limit size, and while I dont want to be accused of being a size king,

Isnt the wants why we have that little tab below our names that says wants?

Just my two pesos but signatures have gotten a tad outa control,

whats next wallpapers featuring our top 50 wants as backgrounds for our homepages?

Boxes; bigger than most postings by the owner; with their siggy's?

Or perhaps a gif on everyones sig with a 5 second vid of their most wants.... In 3d no less.......


ok i digressed , im sorry, but i feel you ya!!!!!
 
Ok I'd like to help out here but I'm lost as to how to make your siggy smaller. If anyone can help with that, please send me a PM (no need to clutter up this thread with my computer ignorance, LOL).
 
Deleting old threads might help somewhat, but if only short threads are being deleted then it's not going to make a huge dent. I just did a character count on my giant post above and it is 4,297 characters. I'm guessing the encoding is probably UTF-8 which means that it is one byte per character, so if that one post was deleted that would only save about 4kb. From what I've seen of zap and thank you threads, most of the posts are only one to three lines long, which means that maybe the entire thread takes up 4kb. Every little bit helps, but it might take a lot of time for a moderator to go through all the posts before we even hit megabytes of data (especially if images that are being shown within those thread truly are being stored as URLs).

There's also the question of whether or not the forum saves back up copies of deleted items. I doubt it does, but if data is not truly deleted from the database then deleting old posts will do nothing.

I think the place it would help most would be lookup time (as long as data is wiped from the database upon deletion). Even if a thread only saves up 10kb of space, that will be one less thread for the server to look through and will hopefully speed up the processing time for requests (but again, to really have an impact we would have to delete a good number of threads).

So the short answer is yes, it could help but it would probably take a lot of time.

As for making signatures shorter, I think it would be great if we could get instructions on here for how to shrink signatures as this seems to be the purpose of the thread :) I can post instructions for Photoshop in my next post, but I'm on a Mac so if someone could post Paint instructions that would be great!
 
Photoshop instructions for how to shrink a signature

I'll include my signature on this post so that you can see what the results of shrinking your signature might look like.

1. Make your original signature on a canvas of whatever size you want!
-This seems to be counterintuitive, but if you have a larger image you can always shrink it without losing quality. If you make an image that is too small and then you decide to make it larger, it will become pixelated. My original image is 650x388 because I wanted it to be the max size possible for the forum. I would always keep your PSD canvas large so that you have room to play later.

2. Once you are happy with your project and ready to save...
-Under the "File" menu, there is an option called "Save for Web". This option will give you full control over what your image looks like as you shrink it plus it will tell you what the pixel size is and what the file size is.
-When you click "Save to Web" a preview page will appear with several options. The image preview will be on the left-hand side, and at the bottom, left-hand corner of the preview you will see the file size. It's probably big (mine was originally 500kb).
-Play with the controls on the right-hand size of the save window. Here are the steps I took as an example:

1. Change the file extension. Originally mine was a PNG-24 which is beautiful because it keeps almost all the detail of the original. But because it keeps all the detail it causes the file size to be big. I made it a JPG which took out some of the less noticeable detail and made the file size drop to about 180kb.
2. Drop the quality down from 100%. This removes little lines that you probably won't notice to make the file size smaller. Mine is at 67% and it is hardly noticeable. You can keep an eye on the image preview as you drop the quality to make sure the image does not become pixelated. If it does, just bump the quality back up a bit and it should go away.
3. Shrink the image size. It's under the Image Size section. The dimensions are automatically locked, so start by making the width 650 and hit enter (if you forget to hit enter, the image preview will not change). If the height is not under 400 at this time, then make the height 400. Now your image is under forum restrictions, but if you can shrink it down even a bit further and still read everything that will help. If everything is unreadable and too small at this size, you might want to consider changing your signature so that you can make images and text larger and easier to see at the smaller size.
4. Check the file size one more time to make sure it is under 125 kb, then save and upload. If it is not under 125kb, you should do some more tweaking so that the forum does not automatically make it 125kb. This will cause your image to become pixelated.

The final result: an image that is 550x328 and 94 kb
 
I think it's hard to have a small signature, and to see what pin it actually is... and to list the pin pics numbers... but that's just me...

I honestly don't mind seeing signatures... but some of them that take up my whole screen are too obnoxious...

It will save server space if we DO NOT upload our signatures directly to DPF.... upload to imgur.com / photobucket.com then insert them using this format...

[ URL ] IMGHERE.JPG [ /URL ]
 
Well the Disney Discussion alone has 236 pages full of threads...some full of posts others not so much.

Will it save a lot of information to just limit that part of the forum to say 10 pages? Or after no one has replied in weeks (2/3?) then it'll get automatically deleted?
How about deleting trade / sale / auction posts a week after they have ended / closed just to save some space....doesn't all the space saving count?
 
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BugCatcherJenna said:
It will save server space if we DO NOT upload our signatures directly to DPF.... upload to imgur.com / photobucket.com then insert them using this format...

[ URL ] IMGHERE.JPG [ /URL ]
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Fair point, a URL is definitely going to take up less space in the database than any image no matter how much processing is done.

PinHunters said:
Will it save a lot of information to just limit that part of the forum to say 10 pages? Or after no one has replied in weeks (2/3?) then it'll get automatically deleted?
How about deleting trade / sale / auction posts a week after they have ended / closed just to save some space....doesn't all the space saving count?
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This is a decision that the admins would have to make. Earlier in this thread someone (Merryweather I think?) was saying that the admins did not want to delete any threads, probably in the case that someone wanted to refer back to a thread or a post. So if deletion of threads was going to be looked at as a solution, they would have to determine appropriate guidelines (zaps, thank yous, closed game and sale threads are all probably good targets).

I think the biggest consideration is cost vs. benefit. It might not make a big enough dent in performance to be worth the time investment to delete old threads. The pros and cons would best be known by someone who knows how the backend works. From my very limited knowledge of the problem, it sounds like too many requests at once is the main issue and that the database is more of a secondary cause of the downtime. To make request processing faster, hundreds of threads would probably have to be deleted to make a difference. Every bit helps (minutely), but practically is it worth the time and effort? Do we want to lose that information? :dunno:

Signature size is definitely a mod/admin decision as well. Right now the upload size is 650x400 on the signature page. PinHunters, yours appears to be around that size so until someone says otherwise you should be good :)
 
amypins said:
Fair point, a URL is definitely going to take up less space in the database than any image no matter how much processing is done.



This is a decision that the admins would have to make. Earlier in this thread someone (Merryweather I think?) was saying that the admins did not want to delete any threads, probably in the case that someone wanted to refer back to a thread or a post. So if deletion of threads was going to be looked at as a solution, they would have to determine appropriate guidelines (zaps, thank yous, closed game and sale threads are all probably good targets).

I think the biggest consideration is cost vs. benefit. It might not make a big enough dent in performance to be worth the time investment to delete old threads. The pros and cons would best be known by someone who knows how the backend works. From my very limited knowledge of the problem, it sounds like too many requests at once is the main issue and that the database is more of a secondary cause of the downtime. To make request processing faster, hundreds of threads would probably have to be deleted to make a difference. Every bit helps (minutely), but practically is it worth the time and effort? Do we want to lose that information? :dunno:

Signature size is definitely a mod/admin decision as well. Right now the upload size is 650x400 on the signature page. PinHunters, yours appears to be around that size so until someone says otherwise you should be good :)
Click to expand...

The zaps page has literally a 1000 pages....so there are a lot of pages to delete and make a difference,
as for our signature, it's uploaded through photobucket and we're using the URL as someone mentioned.
 
BugCatcherJenna said:
I think it's hard to have a small signature, and to see what pin it actually is... and to list the pin pics numbers... but that's just me...

I honestly don't mind seeing signatures... but some of them that take up my whole screen are too obnoxious...

It will save server space if we DO NOT upload our signatures directly to DPF.... upload to imgur.com / photobucket.com then insert them using this format...

[ URL ] IMGHERE.JPG [ /URL ]
Click to expand...

+1!

I have my signature uploaded to and hosted on my tumblr, personally. That's what I do for every picture I've even put on the forum because it was actually easier for me to manage everything from my tumblr.

You can upload your picture to another site and right-click "copy image URL" and paste that into the coding to host your siggy from that other site. That'll save the space for the DPF servers to host DPF =)
 
I sincerely thank everyone for their understanding, support and maturity in discussing this. I also thank Amy for the vast information she provided for our technical questions.

Stand up and take a bow for awesomeness Amy :)

I understand that the server should be moved, but until then maybe reducing images will provide a wittle relief.

Rock on DPF!
 
My siggy was made by a very kind and generous member on here as I am so tech challenged I am still using stone and chisel so I have no clue how to make smaller or even how to update I have tried with step by step instructions but alas I failed. I still have no clue how to insert a picture into my auctions. I need a how to insert pictures and sighs for dummies.
 
I think it kinda takes the fun out of a grail signature if you have to limit the # of pins u put on it. But to each his own i guess!
 
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